See dog that caught the car in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
Download JSON data for dog that caught the car meaning in English (4.1kB)
{
"etymology_text": "From dogs' instinctual urge to chase cars, most of which are traveling far and fast enough that they are never within reach.",
"forms": [
{
"form": "dogs that caught the car",
"tags": [
"plural"
]
}
],
"head_templates": [
{
"args": {
"1": "dogs that caught the car"
},
"expansion": "dog that caught the car (plural dogs that caught the car)",
"name": "en-noun"
}
],
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "noun",
"senses": [
{
"categories": [
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
"parents": [
"Entries with incorrect language header",
"Entry maintenance"
],
"source": "w"
},
{
"kind": "lifeform",
"langcode": "en",
"name": "Dogs",
"orig": "en:Dogs",
"parents": [
"Canids",
"Carnivores",
"Mammals",
"Vertebrates",
"Chordates",
"Animals",
"Lifeforms",
"All topics",
"Life",
"Fundamental",
"Nature"
],
"source": "w"
},
{
"kind": "topical",
"langcode": "en",
"name": "Politics",
"orig": "en:Politics",
"parents": [
"Society",
"All topics",
"Fundamental"
],
"source": "w"
}
],
"examples": [
{
"ref": "1987, Dale Bumpers, “Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution”, in Senate Hearings before the Committee on Appropriations, 99-1027, Pr. 2, p. 634",
"text": "So I went out, and I was telling the President about what a tough time being Governor was. I felt like the dog that caught the car; I really wasn't equipped to be governor... When I got ready to leave, I realized that I had bored a guy who had to make the decision to drop the bomb, telling him what a tough job being the governor of Arkansas was.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2002 May 15, Don Randall, \"Workplace Relations Amendment (Prohibition of Compulsory Union Fees) Bill 2002: Second Reading\", Parliamentary Debates: House of Representatives (Official Hansard), p. 2235",
"text": "Mr Reynolds, you might be interested, who seems to be one of the six who run the Labor Party in Western Australia, says this about Mr Kobelke: 'As I have said before Mr Kobelke and the government are like a dog that caught the car—they didn't know what to do about it when they caught it.'\""
},
{
"ref": "2018 February 27, Dave Holmes, \"Sean Hannity's Favorite Piece of Trump-Era Art Is Terrifying\", Esquire",
"text": "It captures the face of a dog that's caught the car."
},
{
"ref": "2022 February 25, Chris Grey, \"The Dogs that Caught the Car\", Brexit & Beyond",
"text": "Since its use on the very day after the referendum, it has become a cliché to say that Brexiters are like ‘the dog that caught the car’, achieving something they had never expected and then did not know what to do with. That was obvious from the very first hours after the 2016 vote, when Johnson and Gove appeared on TV looking both shocked and scared."
},
{
"ref": "2022 May 10, Alex Shephard, \"With Roe, the GOP Is the Dog that Caught the Car\", The New Republic",
"text": "In this sense, the GOP are the proverbial dog that caught the car. For decades, they have been working their voters into frothing hysteria over the need to protect the unborn from abortionists and their Democratic protectors. But what this means in practice... is far less appealing. From a public health standpoint, the draft decision leaked on Monday is an abomination. From a political standpoint, it imperils midterm victories that were for all intents and purposes inevitable."
}
],
"glosses": [
"A person who has unexpectedly attained an aspirational goal and is now unsure what to do with it."
],
"hyponyms": [
{
"word": "idiot"
}
],
"id": "en-dog_that_caught_the_car-en-noun-Y1nLE9Go",
"links": [
[
"politics",
"politics"
],
[
"person",
"person"
],
[
"has",
"has"
],
[
"unexpectedly",
"unexpectedly"
],
[
"attain",
"attain"
],
[
"aspirational",
"aspirational"
],
[
"goal",
"goal"
],
[
"is",
"is"
],
[
"now",
"now"
],
[
"unsure",
"unsure"
],
[
"do with",
"do with"
],
[
"it",
"it"
]
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(idiomatic, colloquial, especially politics) A person who has unexpectedly attained an aspirational goal and is now unsure what to do with it."
],
"related": [
{
"word": "bite off more than one can chew"
}
],
"synonyms": [
{
"word": "the proverbial dog that caught the car"
}
],
"tags": [
"colloquial",
"especially",
"idiomatic"
],
"topics": [
"government",
"politics"
]
}
],
"word": "dog that caught the car"
}
{
"etymology_text": "From dogs' instinctual urge to chase cars, most of which are traveling far and fast enough that they are never within reach.",
"forms": [
{
"form": "dogs that caught the car",
"tags": [
"plural"
]
}
],
"head_templates": [
{
"args": {
"1": "dogs that caught the car"
},
"expansion": "dog that caught the car (plural dogs that caught the car)",
"name": "en-noun"
}
],
"hyponyms": [
{
"word": "idiot"
}
],
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "noun",
"related": [
{
"word": "bite off more than one can chew"
}
],
"senses": [
{
"categories": [
"English colloquialisms",
"English countable nouns",
"English entries with incorrect language header",
"English idioms",
"English lemmas",
"English multiword terms",
"English nouns",
"English terms with quotations",
"Quotation templates to be cleaned",
"en:Dogs",
"en:Politics"
],
"examples": [
{
"ref": "1987, Dale Bumpers, “Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution”, in Senate Hearings before the Committee on Appropriations, 99-1027, Pr. 2, p. 634",
"text": "So I went out, and I was telling the President about what a tough time being Governor was. I felt like the dog that caught the car; I really wasn't equipped to be governor... When I got ready to leave, I realized that I had bored a guy who had to make the decision to drop the bomb, telling him what a tough job being the governor of Arkansas was.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2002 May 15, Don Randall, \"Workplace Relations Amendment (Prohibition of Compulsory Union Fees) Bill 2002: Second Reading\", Parliamentary Debates: House of Representatives (Official Hansard), p. 2235",
"text": "Mr Reynolds, you might be interested, who seems to be one of the six who run the Labor Party in Western Australia, says this about Mr Kobelke: 'As I have said before Mr Kobelke and the government are like a dog that caught the car—they didn't know what to do about it when they caught it.'\""
},
{
"ref": "2018 February 27, Dave Holmes, \"Sean Hannity's Favorite Piece of Trump-Era Art Is Terrifying\", Esquire",
"text": "It captures the face of a dog that's caught the car."
},
{
"ref": "2022 February 25, Chris Grey, \"The Dogs that Caught the Car\", Brexit & Beyond",
"text": "Since its use on the very day after the referendum, it has become a cliché to say that Brexiters are like ‘the dog that caught the car’, achieving something they had never expected and then did not know what to do with. That was obvious from the very first hours after the 2016 vote, when Johnson and Gove appeared on TV looking both shocked and scared."
},
{
"ref": "2022 May 10, Alex Shephard, \"With Roe, the GOP Is the Dog that Caught the Car\", The New Republic",
"text": "In this sense, the GOP are the proverbial dog that caught the car. For decades, they have been working their voters into frothing hysteria over the need to protect the unborn from abortionists and their Democratic protectors. But what this means in practice... is far less appealing. From a public health standpoint, the draft decision leaked on Monday is an abomination. From a political standpoint, it imperils midterm victories that were for all intents and purposes inevitable."
}
],
"glosses": [
"A person who has unexpectedly attained an aspirational goal and is now unsure what to do with it."
],
"links": [
[
"politics",
"politics"
],
[
"person",
"person"
],
[
"has",
"has"
],
[
"unexpectedly",
"unexpectedly"
],
[
"attain",
"attain"
],
[
"aspirational",
"aspirational"
],
[
"goal",
"goal"
],
[
"is",
"is"
],
[
"now",
"now"
],
[
"unsure",
"unsure"
],
[
"do with",
"do with"
],
[
"it",
"it"
]
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(idiomatic, colloquial, especially politics) A person who has unexpectedly attained an aspirational goal and is now unsure what to do with it."
],
"tags": [
"colloquial",
"especially",
"idiomatic"
],
"topics": [
"government",
"politics"
]
}
],
"synonyms": [
{
"word": "the proverbial dog that caught the car"
}
],
"word": "dog that caught the car"
}
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-05 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.